NJDC Denounces Beck’s Verbal Attack on Reform Rabbis **UPDATE: Beck Apologizes**

Glenn Beck is violating existing laws and should be prosecuted! Some Reform Rabbis are great Rabbis, some are so-so, and some have even contradicted their own teachings/principles.
BUT Glenn Beck’s blanket attacks on Reform Judaism and Reform Rabbis is nothing short of incitement and thinly-veiled anti-Semitic racism. Those who think they are decent Republicans should speak out loud and clear against Beck’s vile, venomous diatribes.
As for those of us who suggest we should just ignore these things; I would agree with you that ignoring those average persons who may reach an audience of, say, at most a few hundred or a few thousand, is generally the right approach. However; in the case of Glenn Beck, whose reach is in the millions or tens of millions and whose potential longer-term reach might be in the hundreds of millions, such an approach of ‘ignoring’ is the wrong one! We Jews in general, exceptions always a given, tend to ignore people who threaten us, our loved ones and our basic human rights in general, by ignoring them. This tendency stems from centuries of extremely unpleasant and horrific experiences we and other totally unjustifiably targeted minorities (such as the Roma, Shinti etc.) have had to survive, too often at unbearable cost in terms of unique and wonderful lives lost eternally! In general we were in specific situations where the least resistance might seem to offer us a fair chance at survival. The Shoah changed all that! We must remain eternally aware of the fact that daring to speak out against what I deem are obvious violations of existing, sensible laws…laws prohibiting incitement to illegal acts of violence against innocent persons and groups of people…that daring to raise our voice as high and loud and clear as possible is not only the right thing to do vis-a-vis Beck and others who serve Conflict-Profiteering schemes, but is our obligation to all the decent and sensible non-Jews who may not be aware of the insidious nature of what Glenn Beck and others perpetrate against the overall welfare of all of America!
All that said; I do have a very effective, ethical, legal method/device to counter these insidious and dangerous Beck-ish garbage!
I am more than happy to hear anything you may have to say about this.

I could have done without Beck’s over the top comparison to militant “Islam” but the rest of what he said is 100 percent accurate.

Rabbis such as Eric Yoffie do confuse Judaism with the left wing of the Democratic Party and vice versa. Yoffie, for example, must have a very unique Torah that contains a religious obligation to support gun control and of course Democratic candidates who support gun control (per his speech at the Million Mom March in 2000). He actually used the phrase “religious obligation” and all but accused NRA mascot Eddie Eagle of making matzos from the blood of murdered children. (He admittedly didn’t say anything about matzos but he did use the phrase “blood of murdered children” along with “criminals’ lobby” to describe the NRA, of which I am a life member.)

Re: “BUT Glenn Beck’s blanket attacks on Reform Judaism and Reform Rabbis is nothing short of incitement and thinly-veiled anti-Semitic racism.” Please don’t confuse Reform Rabbis like Eric Yoffie and Michael Lerner with Reform Jews like me. I am offended not by Glenn Beck’s statement of an unpleasant fact but rather by Mr. Yoffie’s presumption in effectively signing my name to his political viewpoints by claiming that Judaism somehow supports those views.

Eric Yoffie has every right in the world to express his political views (e.g. on gun control) as political views. He does not have the right, at least not the moral right, to express those political views under color of Judaism. This is the sort of thing Glenn Beck was talking about.

In addition, Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org who also signed the anti-Beck letter, works against Israel and therefore six million Israeli Jews at every opportunity. Lerner is another example of why Glenn Beck’s statements are right on the mark.